Welcome to SelfhelpMagazine, your trusted source for self-help and psychology online.

• You are smart enough to look for your own solutions and wise enough to try a few things on your own. You are looking for articles and resources and need to get the facts, along with useful, reliable suggestions.
• You might decide to take advantage of our discussion forums, where an intimate community of caring people have offered each other suggestions and support for more than 14 years. Their comments and advise to one another have been archived, and can be read without needing to register.
• You also can rest assured that if you decide to register and post a message to the community, your comments will not be found through the search engines. You can ask questions about any common mental health, daily living, or relationship issues. Once you feel a part of the group, you can offer support, encouragement and direction to others . We simply ask that you help us protect your privacy by giving yourself an anonymous name that you do not use elsewhere online.

Our mission from the start has been to offer information and a community for people to come together and help themselves as well as each other. We started as a "labor of love" for 300+ volunteers, who shared a "for the people, by the people" spirit of team work and vision.

The result of our effort is here for you, free of charge. We don't try to sell you psychotherapy or related services, persuade you to buy credit cards, or run advertisements that support pharmaceutical company agendas to medicate you before really understanding what is going on in your life. We don't make false claims about being anything other than what we are.

You can feel safe on our pages because our motives have never been profit-driven. We won't be tracking you down through email, or calling you after your visit to our site. We don't collect personal information about you, except for your email address if you want to participate in our forums and blog.

• We didn't just get a psychology degree to launch a website fresh out of grad school with the 'exit strategy' of building a business to sell to a larger company (now like Google).
• We are not run by so-called mental health professionals who never bothered to get licensed or actually work with people and their real-life experiences.
• We are not lawyers or businesspeople who are trying to make an easy buck before cashing in their stock options.
• We don't run pharmaceutical company advertisements, just to line our pockets with the extremely high fees they are willing to pay to persuade you to get the latest medication, without knowing much about you or your circumstance.
• We don't exaggerate our histories because we don't need to.

Those of us who founded and run this website are actual clinicians with high levels of academic achievement, who have passed the competency standards required by licensing, and have been in the psychotherapist chair for at least two and three decades. Most of our authors have worked with people just like you. Luckily, with the ease of publishing online, many solutions to common problems are simple enough for us to outline and explain to you.

We've been online, interacting with people for more than 14 years now, long before many others, including those who claim to have been here longer.

We have consistently offered high quality of service and protections for our visitors. Being self-funded, we've been able to avoid the behind-the-scenes sale of email addresses and peripheral information that is rampant online.

Now that we've grown into needing more expensive features, we're accepting carefully-chosen advertisements and donations to keep our services free to you. We always have been run by licensed practitioners with an understanding and respect for your privacy, and remain completely independent.

As you may have realized, this website also differs from others in that we offer reliable mental health information, based on scientific research and years of clinical expertise. We aim to pack our articles with useful information, self-help tips and reasonable, empirically-based solutions. Over 98% of our content is original material, written exclusively for us, and peer-reviewed by other licensed professionals prior to publication.

SelfhelpMagazine is a free website that features thousands of psychology articles, questions and answers by professionals, reviews, discussion areas for you to share your thoughts and explore those of other people. We have an Amazon-based bookstore that provides the same security features as Amazon.com itself; a free post card service, a meditation center, and much more. We have cartoons, a free email newsletter, surveys and links to thousands of other self-help and psychology-related websites. Our staff updates our site nearly everyday to bring you more information related to the topics you request.

Let us be your starting point for all your self-help and psychology needs! We're one of the most trusted and most well-received websites by the professional world. We hope you find it useful and make it your self-help home. Come on in, and help yourself!

Sincerely,

Marlene M. Maheu, Ph.D.
8/05/08